TOKYO — The embattled operator of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant has released workers' accounts of the desperate moments surrounding the huge earthquake and tsunami that triggered an atomic crisis.At a hearing into the March disaster, a chief operator described how he realised disaster had hit when lights flickered and went out, including those on the control panels, according to an interim report released Friday by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO)."I came to realise a tsunami had hit the site as one of the workers rushed into the room, shouting 'Sea water is gushing in!'", the unnamed chief operator was quoted as saying."I felt totally at a loss after losing power sources," he said. "Other workers appeared anxious. They argued, and one asked: 'Is there any reason for us to be here when there is nothing we can do to control (the reactors)?'""I bowed and begged them to stay."The 9.0-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami on March 11 paralysed electrical and cooling systems at the nuclear power plant, triggering the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl 25 years ago.Friday's interim report was the first to detail testimonies from workers, who were hailed as heroes in the weeks following the accident as they took extreme health risks to try to prevent a worse nuclear disaster.They described attempts to release pressure from a reactor container by manually opening a ventilation valve."We put on the full protection gear but couldn't possibly let young workers do the task, as we had to go into an area where the radiation levels were high," one worker recalled."When I got to the place to open the valve, I heard eerie, deep popping noise from the torus (a donut-shaped structure at the bottom of the reactor)," he said."When I put one of my feet on the torus to reach the valve, my black rubber boot melted and slipped (due to the heat)."The operators also spoke of dismal working conditions as they battled to stabilise the crippled plant."We experienced big aftershocks, and many times we had to run up a hill in desperation (fearing a tsunami) with the full-face mask still on," one worker said.Another worker spoke of the race to lay power cables and bring back the supply of electricity, saying: "We finished the work (in one section) in several hours, although it usually requires one month or two.""It was an operation we had to do in puddles, fearing electrification," the worker said.Explosions and fires at the plant unleashed dangerous levels of radiation, forcing TEPCO to pull out hundreds of workers, leaving just a few dozen behind.Those workers earned the nickname "the Fukushima Fifty", but that number eventually swelled again by thousands, including technicians sent from partners such as Toshiba and Hitachi.They were tasked with keeping cooling water flowing into the six reactors at the plant, three of which eventually overheated and experienced meltdowns.Despite a series of setbacks in the past nine months, the Japanese government and TEPCO say they remain on track to declare a cold shutdown later this month, about a month earlier than initially planned.The atomic accident has not directly claimed any lives but has left tens of thousands of people displaced and rendered whole towns uninhabitable because of radiation, possibly for decades. The quake-tsunami killed about 20,000 people.In a recent interview with AFP, Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of nuclear accident settlement and prevention, hailed the plant workers for their battle to tame the crippled reactors."It was the emergency workers at the plant who have contributed to it the most," he said. "We are finally seeing the goal of cold shutdown in sight. The workers' efforts must be highly applauded."But Hosono, when he visited the plant last month, also cautioned that 30 years' work remained to be done to dismantle the machinery.Last month, then Fukushima Daiichi plant chief Masao Yoshida told state broadcaster NHK: "In the first week immediately after the accident I thought a few times 'I'm going to die.'"Referring to a hydrogen explosion that tore apart the buildings around rectors 1 and 3, he said: "I thought it was all over."

The government intends to place Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) under its control in a bid to take the initiative in reforming the crisis-hit utility and carrying through fundamental reform of its energy policy.

Specifically, the government is aiming to take the opportunity of revamping TEPCO's management to split power suppliers into power generation and transmission entities and nationalize the nuclear power generation business as part of its energy policy reform.

In restructuring TEPCO, the government intends to appoint outsiders to replace a majority of current members of its board led by Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata in addition to providing the power supplier with an infusion of public funds.

TEPCO has been in a serious financial crisis since an accident at its tsunami-hit Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant on March 11. The government's Nuclear Damage Liability Facilitation Fund has effectively kept the company afloat in order to ensure a stable supply of electric power and payments of compensation to those affected by the nuclear crisis, and to avoid confusion in the market.

Still, the company's board is struggling to rehabilitate itself. It will be required to decommission and dismantle the crippled nuclear reactors and decontaminate areas tainted with radioactive substances leaking from the plant, which is estimated to cost the utility trillions of yen.

TEPCO is aiming to dispose of its assets, slash its personnel expenses, sharply raise its electricity charges and resume operations at its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Niigata Prefecture amid desperate efforts to secure enough profits to cover such expenses.

However, Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Yukio Edano, the regulator of the electric power industry, has voiced opposition to any electricity charge hike and reactivation of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant.

Since TEPCO cannot avoid operating losses without rate hikes or a resumption of operations at the nuclear power station, some TEPCO executives say the government's infusion of public funds is inevitable. Some financial institutions have also expressed their hope that the planned infusion of public funds will help TEPCO stay afloat.

Government organizations concerned have proposed a few options to split TEPCO. A panel of Cabinet ministers working on the reform of TEPCO and the electric power industry as a whole is calling for a split of the company's nuclear power division into a company responsible for compensation payments. Another plan calls for the split of TEPCO into a holding company, under which nuclear power generation, conventional power generation and power transmission companies would be placed.

However, as TEPCO has strongly resisted any move to split it, a fierce tug-of-war between the utility and the government is expected after the New Year's period. (By Nobuhiro Saito, Kohei Misawa and Daisuke Nagai, Tokyo Economic News Department)

Long and tough road ahead for work to decommission Fukushima nuclear reactors

It is expected to take more than 30 years to decommission crippled reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, and workers tasked with the difficult mission would have to venture into "uncharted territory" filled with hundreds of metric tons of highly radioactive nuclear fuel, experts say.

After the expert committee of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) compiled a report on procedures to decommission the No. 1 to 4 reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant on Dec. 7, the actual work is expected to move into high gear after the turn of the year. As in the case of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, the workers would try to remove melted nuclear fuel after shielding radiation with water, a technique called a "water tomb." But the work would have to be done in a "territory where humans have not stepped into before," said a senior official of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the troubled Fukushima nuclear power station. The work is so difficult that it is expected to take more than 30 years to finish decommissioning the reactors.

The key part of the decommissioning work is to remove a total of 1,496 fuel rods from the No. 1 to 3 nuclear reactors and 3,108 fuel rods from nuclear fuel pools of the No. 1 to 4 reactors. The government and TEPCO are expected to start decommissioning the reactors early in the New Year after unveiling detailed plans around Dec. 16 that the nuclear plant has been brought under control by achieving a stable state called a ''cold shutdown.''

According to experts, filling the containment vessels with water completely to shield radiation is the "foremost and biggest hurdle." In order to carry out the task, it is necessary to spot and repair damaged parts in the containment vessels. But it is not an easy task. Up to about 5,000 millisieverts per hour of radiation -- lethal levels -- have been detected in the reactor building of the No. 1 reactor.

In the work schedule announced in April, TEPCO said it would bring the nuclear plant under control by filling the reactors with water. But subsequent analysis of the accident suggested that the No. 1 and 2 reactors had holes of up to 50 square meters caused by hydrogen explosions and the like. In the work schedule announced in May, TEPCO said it had scrapped its plan to repair the containment vessels and suspended the work to fill them with water.

Moreover, workers have been fighting an uphill battle to remove crumbled fuel. The reactors had been running without cooling water for a long time, and most of the fuel melted and apparently dropped into the containment vessel from the bottom of the pressure vessel at the No. 1 reactor.

A single fuel rod contains about 170 kilograms of uranium, and a simple calculation suggests that about 254 tons of uranium in the reactors alone must be recovered. The distance between the upper lid and the bottom of a containment vessel is up to 35 meters. From that far away, the work has to be done to chop off and recover melted and crumbled fuel by using remote controlled cranes. Furthermore, the melted fuel is mixed with metal from fuel pellets and reactor parts.

"The decommissioning work should be moved up and finished promptly," said Fukushima Gov. Yuhei Sato. He submitted a 6-item statement to the JAEC's expert committee. But at the meeting on Dec. 7, the expert committee did not give any in-depth response but simply added to its report that "We will urge people concerned to realize it as soon as possible." Kyoto University professor Hajimu Yamana, who heads the expert committee, said on Dec. 7, "Because no one has seen the inside of the nuclear reactors, the timing of starting the work to recover nuclear fuel mentioned in the report is only a nonbinding target."

New Video of Scientist Kaltofen Presenting to American Public Health Association

A professional video of Marco Kaltofen's presentation to the American Public Health Association was recently made available to Fairewinds. Kaltofen states that hot particles are contaminating portions of northern Japan. He also states that auto air filters from Fukushima, that he tested in his Massachusetts laboratory, are so radioactive that they have to be disposed of in a buried radioactive waste disposal site in the US. Additionally, he expresses concerns for the mechanics who work on cars in Fukushima Prefecture.

SENTAKU MAGAZINEReal cause of nuclear crisisTokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the operator of the stricken Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Station, has been insisting that the culprit that caused the nuclear crisis was the huge tsunami that hit the plant after the March 11 earthquake. But evidence is mounting that the meltdown at the nuclear power plant was actually caused by the earthquake itself.

According to a science journalist well versed in the matter, Tepco is afraid that if the earthquake were to be determined as the direct cause of the accident, the government would have to review its quake-resistance standards completely, which in turn would delay by years the resumption of the operation of existing nuclear power stations that are suspended currently due to regular inspections.

The journalist is Mitsuhiko Tanaka, formerly with Babcock-Hitachi K.K. as an engineer responsible for designing the pressure vessel for the No. 4 reactor at the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant.

He says if the earthquake caused the damage to the plumbing, leading to a "loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA)" in which vaporized coolant gushed into the containment building from the damaged piping, an entirely new problem — "vulnerability to earthquake resistance of the nuclear reactor's core structure" — would surface and that this will require a total review of the government's safety standards for nuclear power plants in Japan, which is quite frequently hit by earthquakes.

Such a review will require a number of years of study, making it impossible to restart the now suspended nuclear power stations next year as Tepco hopes.

What puzzles Tanaka most is why the emergency condensers, which turn vaporized coolant (steam) into water and are supposed to lower both the pressure and temperature of the reactor, were not operating at the time of the accident although the condensers have the capability of functioning even when electricity becomes unavailable.

It is highly probable, he says, that the plumbing linked with the condensers was damaged by the earthquake, causing water or vapor to leak out, thus leading to the nonfunctioning of the condensers.

In a report released on May 23, Tepco said it stopped the emergency condensers after the quake occurred but before the tsunami hit the plant so that the temperature of the pressure vessel would not change by more than 55 degrees Celsius per hour. This, it said, was strictly in accordance with the instructions contained in the operating manual.

When a Diet committee looking into the incident asked Tepco to submit a copy of the manual, most pages of the documents so submitted were "blacked out," as the company alleged they contained trade secrets which it did not want to go into the public domain.

Totally dissatisfied, the committee issued another order to Tepco to submit the whole manual in its original form, to which the company complied on Oct. 24. This led journalist Tanaka to come to the conclusion that the utility was not telling the truth.

He said the 55-C-per-hour is a figure used in ordinary plants in a non-emergency situation to keep piping in a good condition and that the figure should not be used in an emergency. He pointed out that the manual says that the figure is something that should be followed in operations just prior to a cold shutdown of a reactor, not immediately after a problem has arisen.

At a news conference on May 15, Tepco said that according to its simulation, the meltdown at the No. 1 reactor of the nuclear power plant happened about 15 hours after the earthquake because the tsunami destroyed all electricity supply sources and the water level in the reactor lowered rapidly. But Tanaka says that the simulation is far different from the actually measured water level and pressure.

A rapid increase in the pressure inside the containment vessel is especially unnatural. Although the simulation report says that the pressure inside the containment vessel shot up to more than seven times standard atmospheric pressure around 5:40 a.m. on March 12, or about 15 hours after the quake, the fact is that the pressure had already risen to six times the standard at 12:12 a.m. on March 12 — five to six hours before the time given by the simulation report.

Simulation data calculated by a computer can be manipulated easily depending on the types of input. Tanaka suspects that Tepco cooked up simulation results to suit its own purposes in an attempt to deceive the public.

Atsuo Watanabe, former designer of containment vessels at Toshiba Corp., said on Oct. 26 that the most fundamental cause of the Fukushima plant fiasco probably lay in the blind acceptance of the safety standards adopted in the United States, which did not take into consideration all potential consequences from earthquakes.

The reactors damaged at Fukushima were of the GE Mark 1 type designed and built by General Electric Co. He pointed out that in the U.S., there is no need to consider the combination of an earthquake and a loss-of-coolant accident caused by broken piping, adding that it is reasonable to assume that the earthquake and loss of coolant occurred simultaneously at Fukushima No. 1.

Perhaps it was against such a background that Tepco blacked out crucial matters in the operational manual of the reactors, as there are 10 other GE Mark 1 type reactors in Japan.

These and other scientific findings have given rise to serious suspicion of Tepco's claim that the crisis at the nuclear power plant was caused by the tsunami, and not by the earthquake. And a view that blames the tremor as the true culprit is becoming more and more trusted.

It is imperative that the special investigative committee recently created within the Diet undertake thorough inquiry into the real cause of the accidents. The panel must force those Tepco employees who have worked on the spot to testify, even though the company has so far obstinately opposed such testimonies.

Should the government decide to permit the resumption of nuclear power stations in various parts of the country by blindly accepting assertions coming from Tepco, the whole nation would face uneasiness in preventing another calamity in the future and would fail to fulfill its accountability to the whole world, which is watching whether Japan will conduct a thorough investigation to determine the true cause of the Fukushima disaster.

This is an abridged translation of an article from the December issue of Sentaku, a monthly magazine covering Japan's political, social and economic scenes.

Noda to declare cold shutdown at Fukushima plantThe Japanese government will soon declare that a state of cold shutdown has been achieved for all the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.The announcement scheduled for Friday will mean the achievement of the second phase of the timetable to bring the plant under control. The timetable, revised in October, aims to achieve this phase by the year-end.The government has now confirmed that all the conditions have been met. It says temperatures at the bottom of the reactor pressure vessels and inside thecontainment vessels have basically fallen below 100 degrees Celsius. The amount of radioactive materials emitted has also dropped, with radiation levels on the compound's border falling below one millisievert per year. The government says stable circulatory cooling of the reactors can be achieved with contaminated water, as alternative methods have been secured against malfunctions or accidents.Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda will make the official declaration that the reactors are in a stable condition at a news conference on Friday.The government will launch a new body to oversee the completion of the process. It will be led by a Cabinet minister and the president of Tokyo Electric PowerCompany, the plant operator. It will also release a medium-to-long term timetable for the Daiichi plant, which includes its decommissioning, while helping residents to return home.Wednesday, December 14, 2011 08:43 +0900 (JST)